Life's a drag

After her father died of Aids, this fledgling Scissor Sister forsook her books, moved to San Francisco and became an honorary drag queen on a journey that took her from cult status to chart-topping fame. Now the star who modelled herself on Miss Piggy preaches 'social activism'

The venue is called Westpoint Arena, which sounds impressive but is actually a bleak metal cowshed off a motorway outside Exeter. It is surrounded by signposts to shearing sheds and livestock pens and a huddle of Nissen huts that must have been left over from the war. It is in one of these that I finally meet my heroine, Ana Matronic, lead female singer (or, actually, only female) in Scissor Sisters. She became my heroine when I read an interview which asked about her weight and she said: 'I would rather read a book than get on a treadmill.' I wanted to kiss her for that. I also liked her saying that it was The Muppet Show that made her want to be a performer - she modelled herself on Miss Piggy.

So it is quite disappointing to meet her and find she is not big at all. On stage, she looks vast, a great goddess Kali figure round which Jake Shears, the lead singer, dervishly whirls. When she raises her arms, as she often does, her armpits seem to billow like clouds. But down in the Nissen hut, she is a tiny thing with a delicate, porcelain face. Even though she is wrapped in a great puffy duvet coat against the cold, she still only looks a size 10.

Second disappointment is that the way she talks reminds me of Hillary Clinton and you don't really expect to find Hillary Clinton playing a gig at Exeter Westpoint. But Ana Matronic is formidably serious. Within about five minutes, she is telling me that her ambition as a child was to get a PhD and become a university professor, probably in anthropology. 'I was really academic when I was young.' So what changed her? 'Nothing,' she insists. 'I still am academic - I love reading history books.'

Yes, but being a professor is a bit different from singing in a band, surely?

'Well, I like performing and I think what I do and teaching are very similar - you have to get up in front of a big group of people and make it interesting enough that they'll listen to you for an hour and then hopefully you'll transform them in a way. So I think that they're very similar. My mom's a teacher.'

How on earth did someone so earnest and apparently humourless ever become a pop singer, especially in a group as outrageous as Scissor Sisters? She is 32 and grew up in Portland, Oregon, which she describes as a beautiful but rainy city rather like Bristol. Her father was art director of a bioengineering company and her mother was an art teacher and icon painter.

They split up when she was three and her father moved to San Francisco. She didn't know why until three years later, when her mother told her and her sister that their father was gay and had gone to live with a man. 'I burst into tears immediately because I knew this meant my parents would never be together again.'

In fact, her mother remarried soon afterwards and she took her stepfather's name, Lynch. There was never any loss of contact with her father - she and her sister went to stay with him in San Francisco four times a year - but she feels she never really got to know him because he was 'very emotionally closed' and possibly suffered 'some self-loathing' about being gay. Then, when she was 15, she learnt that her father had Aids. She and her sister went to visit him for Christmas, but he was rushed into hospital with pneumonia as soon as they arrived and died soon afterwards. To make matters worse, their much loved grandmother, who lived with them in Portland, had died a month before.

The loss of her father was worsened by the fact that she couldn't confide in anyone - at school, she said he had cancer. 'There was such a stigma attached to it (this was 1990) that people knowing he had Aids would overshadow the fact that he was dying and that was the most important thing that I wanted to communicate - that my father was being taken away from me.'

She hadn't even told her friends that he was gay. As far as she knew, there were no other kids at her school with gay parents or even gay relatives. 'So it was incredibly isolating. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I met people who had lost good friends or family members to Aids.' Consequently, she is now patron of a charity called Body & Soul that aims to help the families, and especially the children, of people with HIV. She is giving a charity concert for them in February and hopes Observer readers will support it.

It was a desire to understand more about her father that made her drop out of college after two years and move to San Francisco, where she gravitated to the gay community. It meant abandoning her plans for a PhD, but, 'I got a little tired of academia, having been in high school for so long. I felt I don't want to be in an academic system; I want to make up my own rules. And although I had some amazing teachers, socially, there was only a very small number of people I was friends with in Portland.

'As performing became more and more of a priority in my life, I thought: who can teach me how to be a performance artist anyway? So basically, I moved to San Francisco to be a performance artist and a hippie.'

I read that she did a drag act at a club called the Tranny Shack, but how can you do a drag act if you're a woman?

'Well, RuPaul is a drag queen and he said a really great thing; he said, "You're born naked and everything you put on after that is drag." Even in everyday life, people use clothing to express something about themselves; either it makes them feel good or look good, or they use it to hide or whatever. And I was really attracted to that. I evolved my own set of characters that I would perform at this drag cabaret. It was a wonderful free place to express myself and to play with different aspects of my personality.'

But did the audience think she was really a man? 'No, no. I was what they called a faux queen. But because I was so active in this one club and it became so popular, I think I surpassed the status of faux queen to actual drag queen! It was a really great place because there were theme nights that were traditional drag, like Abba night or Debbie Harry night, but then there were nights that were art, for want of a better word. We would have, say, industrial design night and you had to search your brain to come up with an idea for a performance. It was incredible fun to do. Tranny Shack became my college of performance art, a great place to learn and grow as a performer.'

After three years in San Francisco, she moved to New York and launched her own cabaret show and also began singing. It was at this point, in 2000, that she met Jake Shears. He was dressed as an abortion at the time, which involved lots of blood, coat hangers and plastic sheeting, while his partner was dressed as the morning-after pill. 'They were the gruesome twosome,' she laughs. 'It was just so sick that I loved it.' (To be fair, I can't imagine Hillary Clinton saying this.)

Jake was just starting a group with his friend and co-writer Babydaddy and invited her to join. It was called Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters. As the band became more successful, they shortened its name and lengthened its line-up, adding Paddy Boom and Del Marquis to the mix. They became fairly well known in New York, but it wasn't until they toured England in 2004 that they took off. Their debut album was at number one for months and sold two-and-a-half million copies. Bono called them 'the best pop band in the world'. Elton John asked them to support him on tour and co-wrote their last single, 'I Don't Feel Like Dancin".

They are still in the odd position of being much better known in the UK than the US, but Ana says that's fine: 'I think the plan is to make a career no matter where it is. None of us really got into this group for fame, fortune, celebrity. It's not about that... it's all about the music. I like to say that our success in the States was ordinary and our success in the UK was extraordinary.'

They disappeared for most of 2005, but that was because they were writing their second album, Ta-Dah!, and giving the public a break. 'It was a conscious decision to take some time out. I get tired of seeing the same people all the time, putting out records and being on television. To me, that seems less about the music and more about staying a celebrity, which is not our intention or our interest. It was lovely to be home and get dirt under my fingernails in the garden. It was actually a luxury to do dishes!'

But now they are back on the road, touring the UK, with their final concert at Wembley tonight. Ana has only had one week off since June and says she's tired - most nights they sleep on the bus. 'It can be dismal,' she admits, looking at the rain beating down outside the Nissen hut. Exeter is a beautiful city but she won't see it because they'll be on the bus overnight to Bournemouth. But she accepts this is the price you pay to build a pop career.

'You're never guaranteed anything in this business and you have to capitalise on every opportunity you're afforded. You get a deal from a record label and they say - OK we'll release your first single and put some money behind it. But you're not guaranteed that you're going to get second single, so you have to work hard and take every opportunity, do every interview and try to build audiences. Before the first album went to number one, we did four tours of the UK. There will probably be two for this album. So yes, it's hard work, but it's great, too. It's the life and I love it - I love performing.'

It means that she often goes for weeks without seeing her boyfriend, film-maker Seth Kirby, who lives in New York, though they talk on the phone every day. They have been together three-and-a-half years and she describes him approvingly as 'the queerest straight guy in New York. Possibly the world.'

He is only her second boyfriend; moving in almost exclusively gay circles as she does and having what she calls a 'queer' sensibility, not many straight men came her way. It might have been easier to be a lesbian, but she says that although she 'experimented', she is definitely straight. She wants to have children eventually, but is in no hurry - her mother was 39 when she had her. She doesn't know whether she could combine a career and children. 'I quite like the idea of disappearing when I have kids, like Patti Smith did.'

Money is unimportant to her. The only luxury she has bought herself with her Scissor Sisters earnings is a glass harmonica (which works on the same principle as rubbing a wineglass with a wet finger) which she saw on a TV programme about the inventions of Benjamin Franklin. She hopes to play it on stage eventually, but is still learning. She would never dream of flying first class - 'I think that's a rip-off' - and she is completely untempted by the notion of employing domestic staff.

'The idea of someone else doing my laundry makes me feel strange. I maintain pretty much the same lifestyle as before any of this happened. The only difference is now I don't have to worry about paying rent and stuff like that.'

She also does a lot for charity. Her particular charity is Body & Soul, but Scissor Sisters have a policy of supporting local charities at their concerts - everyone on the guest list has to donate £10 - and giving them a stall to promote their work. 'I really believe in social activism,' Ana explains earnestly, 'and it's something that seems to have fallen by the wayside, especially with my generation. But it was instilled in me by my parents: you try anything you can to leave the world better than you found it.

'So if a charity asks me to spend five minutes of my time having my picture taken or saying a few words, to me, it would be sinful not to do it. I don't actually believe in sin, but you know what I mean! This business is set up to make a big return and you work really hard, but I feel like for us not to do things for charity would be absolutely wrong.'

So saying, she goes off to don a glittery, rainbow-striped balloon dress and five-inch heels and stride around the stage singing 'There ain't no tits on the radio'. It is a great concert. But I wish she hadn't told me that she saw performing as a form of teaching - it ruins my evening. As soon as I start seeing the audience, and myself in it, as an unruly class of kids that have to be pacified, I come over all sulky and start resenting her bossiness.

She is teacher-like on stage. She gives little homilies between songs about how we are all sisters, how we must be nice to each other, and accept difference, and how we must support local charities and save the planet and yukkety-yuk. I find it unbearably patronising and not at all what I require from a pop heroine. Admirable though Ana Lynch is, I find she has somewhat spoiled my affection for Ana Matronic. Mama, don't preach.

· Scissor Sisters' UK tour ends tonight at Wembley Arena. A new single 'Land of a Thousands Words' is out on 4 December. For further information about Body & Soul, a UK charity supporting children, teenagers and families living with HIV, visit www.bodyandsoulcharity.org

Sister act

Born 14 August 1974 in Portland, Oregon. Ana's father died from Aids after separating from her mother and coming out as gay.

Education An anthropology graduate; her favourite subjects at school were English and history.

Fans Ana's devotees are known as 'nuns'.

Robots Her enormous robot tattoo is, like her stage name, inspired by the TV series The Bionic Woman and her love of robots.

Awards Scissor Sisters made Brit Awards history last year, winning three international categories: Best Group, Breakthrough Act and Best Album.

Influences Miss Piggy in The Muppet Show, Blondie, Siouxsie and the Banshees.

She says 'I realised I was a drag queen trapped in a woman's body.'

They say 'Ana is one of the smartest people I know, but at the same time, she relishes stupidity.'(Scissor Sisters drummer Paddy Boom).